The companion piece. If you want the rules, the full damage history, and the whole 2014 versus 2024 breakdown, that’s all in the Divine Favor explainer post. Go read that first, then come back, because here we’re only asking one thing, how do you wring every last point of radiant out of a paladin’s cheapest bonus action.
Divine Favor is the paladin spell that spent ten years living in Bless’s shadow and then got the exact buff in 2024 that puts it back in the conversation. So I sorted the best tactics into four buckets. Real uses that lean on the actual rules. Cheeses that are clever but legal. Questionable stuff that lives and dies by your table. And the deviant stuff, because paladins are not immune to doing something dumb with a holy light.
REAL USES (rules-solid)
1. Cast it, then still swing. The whole reason this spell exists. Divine Favor is a bonus action, so on turn one you flick it on and still take the Attack action in the same round. There’s no lost tempo, no turn where you buff and do nothing. From that point every weapon hit for the next minute carries an extra 1d4 radiant. (Rules as written.)
2. It scales with your attack count, not your slot. One d4 on one swing is nothing. But the moment you have Extra Attack at level 5 you’re adding 1d4 to two swings a turn, and a two-weapon or Polearm Master paladin is adding it to three. The spell quietly gets better every time your character gains an attack, which is the opposite of most first-level options. The community math lands in the same place. On r/onednd, one poster crunched it plainly, hit with four attacks and Divine Favor already beats a first-level Divine Smite for that slot, and most paladins are landing eight or more hits over a fight (r/onednd). A separate breakdown in the Hunter’s Mark comparison thread put the break-even point at the same four hits (r/onednd).
3. Radiant is the damage type you want to be dealing. Divine Favor’s bonus is radiant, and radiant is one of the least resisted damage types in the whole monster manual. Almost nothing shrugs it off, and a pile of nasty things, undead and fiends especially, take it on the chin. Paladins on r/onednd point to exactly this. One flagged that Divine Favor is radiant and effective against undead (r/onednd), and another rates it a prep slot purely for the low-level zombie and shadow fights where radiant sails clean through the resistances that stop a normal weapon (r/onednd). (Damage type confirmed in local Player’s Handbook data.)
4. It stacks with Divine Smite on the same hit. Divine Favor and Divine Smite are two separate effects, so when you crack someone with a smite, that same hit also carries the Divine Favor d4. Bank both. And because both are extra damage on a hit, a crit doubles the smite dice and the Divine Favor die together, which turns a lucky roll into a genuinely silly number. (Rules as written.)
5. It works on ranged and Dexterity attacks, which smite does not. Here’s the underrated one for archery and thrown-weapon paladins. In the 2014 rules Divine Smite only fires on a melee weapon attack, but Divine Favor just says weapon attacks, so a Dex paladin plinking with a longbow or hurling javelins is adding radiant to every shot. This is a live r/DnD use case. A player running a ranged gunslinger paladin who cannot smite with a pistol went looking for spells that still work, and Divine Favor was the answer the thread kept handing back (r/DnD). A commenter in the Hunter’s Mark comparison also noted Divine Favor rides on a range of self, so unlike Hunter’s Mark’s ninety feet there’s no distance at which your longbow shot stops carrying it (r/onednd).
6. Use it to stretch one slot across a mob fight. When you’re facing a pack of low-threat enemies instead of one boss, spending a slot on a single smite is a poor trade. Divine Favor takes that same first-level slot and spreads its value across every hit you land on every goblin for a minute. A DM in the Hunter’s Mark comparison put the contrast bluntly, in a four to six enemy encounter Hunter’s Mark is almost useless because you keep re-marking, while Divine Favor guarantees a rider on every swing for all ten rounds (r/onednd).
7. In 2024, run it alongside a concentration spell. This is the buff that changes everything and it belongs in the real-uses bucket because it’s simply how the 2024 spell works. Divine Favor no longer needs concentration, so a 2024 paladin can cast it, then cast or keep a concentration spell like Hunter’s Mark or Bless, and hold both at the same time. Two riders, one paladin, zero conflict. This is now the default paladin opening on r/onednd. One Conquest paladin listed Divine Favor as the spell they cast to start every single battle, before ever spending concentration on Bless (r/onednd). An r/DnD poster spelled out the exact two-turn sequence, Hunter’s Mark round one, Divine Favor round two, and now every hit carries both (r/DnD). (Rules as written, 2024 Player’s Handbook page 265, concentration removed, confirmed in local data.)
CHEESES (clever, and mostly legal)
8. The dual-wield radiant engine. A two-weapon fighting paladin makes the most attacks per turn of any paladin build, and every single one of those hits, main hand, off hand, all of it, eats another 1d4 radiant. This is the build the 2024 community keeps circling back to. An r/onednd post on the paladin’s sleeper dual-wield buff worked it out, at level five you can swing four times using the Nick mastery, and concentration-free Divine Favor tacks 4d4 onto that turn for free (r/onednd). At levels eleven and up it gets sillier, and one commenter walked through a dual-wield paladin making four attacks that each deal 1d8 plus 1d4, Radiant Strikes stacked right on top of Divine Favor (r/onednd).
9. Crit-fishing multiplies your rider too. Any build that widens your crit range, a three level Champion fighter dip for crits on 19 to 20, an ally handing you advantage, means more crits, and every crit doubles the Divine Favor die right alongside your doubled smite dice. The same dual-wield thread points out the natural pairing, keep swinging normally with Divine Favor humming, hold your Smite spells for the moment a crit actually lands, and dump the doubled dice then (r/onednd).
10. The 2024 layered-smite turn. Because 2024 Divine Favor is free of concentration, you can hold it at the same time as Searing Smite, which does need concentration. Now a single swing can carry the weapon damage, the Divine Favor radiant, the Searing Smite fire, and a slot-fueled Divine Smite on top. It’s a four-source hit off a paladin who spent one earlier bonus action setting it up. (Rules as written, 2024.)
11. Feed it extra attacks from anywhere. Haste grants an extra attack, Action Surge from a fighter dip doubles your Attack action, a Polearm Master or Crusher bonus-action swing adds one more, and Divine Favor tags every one of them with radiant. As one r/onednd regular put it, an unlimited bonus-action attack is often the better play over smiting, because it costs no slot and still benefits from Radiant Strikes and Divine Favor (r/onednd).
12. It’s a fire-and-forget you can pre-cast. Since it only asks a bonus action and, in 2024, no concentration, you can drop Divine Favor the round before you expect to make contact, walk into the fight already glowing, and spend your first combat turn purely on offense. Buff on the approach, swing on arrival. (Rules as written.)
QUESTIONABLE (ask your DM)
13. Does it work with your unarmed strikes? This is the sneaky wording trap, and the two editions answer it differently. The 2014 spell says “weapon attacks,” and an unarmed strike is a weapon attack, so a lot of tables let a monk-paladin or a brawler add the radiant to punches. The 2024 spell was rewritten to say “attacks with weapons,” and per Jeremy Crawford an unarmed strike is not a weapon, so by that stricter wording your fists are out. Same spell, two different answers, so check which book you’re playing. (Rules as written wording difference, local data; unarmed-strike-versus-weapon ruling per Sage Advice)
14. Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade. Those cantrips have you make a weapon attack as part of casting them. Read literally, that weapon attack hitting should trigger Divine Favor’s extra radiant, since the spell keys off the hit, not off you taking the Attack action. Most DMs allow it, but because it’s a cantrip wrapping a weapon swing, a few will squint. Worth a quick confirm. (Rules as written, DM interpretation.)
15. Natural weapons and the old edition argument. If your character attacks with claws, a bite, or a tail, do those count? In the third edition version of this spell there was a whole thread arguing that natural weapons qualified because the wording only meant to exclude spells. In fifth edition it’s murkier and it’s a table call, but the historical read leaned toward yes. Bring it up before you rely on it. (Edition-history discussion, EN World)
16. The Celestial warlock Radiant Soul stack. Dip Celestial warlock and Radiant Soul lets you add your Charisma modifier once per turn when a spell you cast deals radiant damage. A player on r/3d6 asked whether that rides on Divine Favor’s radiant die, and the thread split. Some read the wording as a clean once-per-turn bump, while others pointed out that Divine Favor targets you and not an enemy, so the “one of the spell’s targets” clause gets murky (r/3d6). A tidy tack-on if your DM buys the wording, a dead letter if they don’t. (DM interpretation.)
17. Is it a worse Bless, or a better Hunter’s Mark? The eternal paladin argument, and 2024 flipped which fight you’re even having. Under 2014 rules the knock was Bless, which buffs three allies on attacks and saves for the same slot and the same concentration, while Divine Favor buffs one person’s damage only, which is why plenty of players leaned Bless every time. Then 2024 dropped the concentration and the whole conversation moved to Hunter’s Mark. The r/onednd thread titled “Is Divine Favor just better Hunter’s Mark” got a top answer calling it straight superior for damage, with the only real caveat being Hunter’s Mark’s hour-long duration and tracking (r/onednd). A companion thread went harder with the headline “New Divine Favor has no concentration, RIP Hunter’s Mark,” where posters marveled that WotC buffed Divine Favor when it was already competitive (r/onednd). The drama boiled over on r/3d6, in a thread so heated the mods locked it, asking why Hunter’s Mark still eats concentration when Divine Favor doesn’t, and one poster laid out a Dex Vengeance paladin out-rangering the Ranger outright by stacking Hunter’s Mark and Divine Favor on a dual-wield build with advantage on every swing (r/3d6). Where you land depends entirely on which edition’s Divine Favor you’re holding.
DEVIANT, FUNNY, AND CURSED
18. The holy machine gun. Take every d4 the spell touches to its logical extreme. A dual-wield paladin, hasted, with a Polearm Master or Crusher bonus swing, is throwing four or five attacks a round, and Divine Favor slaps a radiant die on all of them. The trick is pure volume. Each die is small, but you are rolling a fistful of them every round, and there’s something satisfying about a d4 that never stops showing up. (Rules as written.)
19. Reflavor the glow and commit to the bit. The spell literally wraps you in divine radiance, so lean in. Your blade catches fire with holy light, your knuckles glow, your javelins streak like little comets. It changes nothing mechanically and it makes every hit feel like the paladin is cashing in a favor from on high, which, read the name, is exactly what’s happening. (Rules as written, pure flavor.)
20. The 2024 Christmas-tree crit. Set the whole thing up, Divine Favor on, Searing Smite held, then land a crit and dump your highest Divine Smite slot into it. On that one hit you’re rolling doubled weapon dice, doubled Divine Favor radiant, doubled smite radiant, and the fire on top. It is an absurd pile of dice for a single swing, and it’s all legal in the 2024 rules because none of those three riders fights the others for concentration anymore. (Rules as written, 2024.)
So that’s the pile, honest and rules-first. The throughline on Divine Favor is simple. It was a fine spell strangled by concentration for a decade, it rewards the paladin who swings the most, and in 2024 it finally gets to share the stage instead of fighting for the spotlight. Cast it on the build that throws a lot of dice and it earns its slot. What’s your call, is Divine Favor a keeper on your 2024 paladin, or does Bless still win the slot? Let me know in the comments below, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
